TODAY IN HISTORY ― MARCH 12

March 12 is the 71st day of the year (72nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 294 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Monday, Thursday or Saturday (58 in 400 years each) than on Tuesday or Wednesday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Friday or Sunday (56). 

NATIONAL NAPPING DAY 

538 – Vitiges, king of the Ostrogoths ends his siege of Rome and retreats to Ravenna, leaving the city in the hands of the victorious Byzantine general, Belisarius. 

1550 – Several hundred Spanish and indigenous troops under the command of Pedro de Valdivia defeat an army of 60,000 Mapuche at the Battle of Penco during the Arauco War in present-day Chile.

1622 – Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, founders of the Jesuits, are canonized as saints by the Catholic Church.

1864 – American Civil War: The Red River Campaign begins as a US Navy fleet of 13 Ironclads and 7 Gunboats and other support ships enter the Red River.

1894 – Coca-Cola is bottled and sold for the first time in Vicksburg, Mississippi, by local soda fountain operator Joseph A. Biedenharn.

1912 – The Girl Guides (later renamed the Girl Scouts of the USA) are founded in the United States.

1918 – Moscow becomes the capital of Russia again after Saint Petersburg held this status for 215 years.

1928 – In California, the St. Francis Dam fails; the resulting floods kill over 600 people.

1930 – Mahatma Gandhi leads a 200-mile march, known as the Salt March, to the sea in defiance of British opposition, to protest the British monopoly on salt.

1933 – Great Depression: Franklin D. Roosevelt addresses the nation for the first time as President of the United States. This is also the first of his "fireside chats".

1940 – Winter War: Finland signs the Moscow Peace Treaty with the Soviet Union, ceding almost all of Finnish Karelia. Finnish troops and the remaining population are immediately evacuated.

1942 – Pacific War: The Battle of Java ends with an Allied surrender to the Japanese Empire.

1993 – Several bombs explode in Bombay (Mumbai), India, killing about 300 and injuring hundreds more.

1993 – North Korea nuclear weapons program: North Korea says that it plans to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and refuses to allow inspectors access to its nuclear sites.

1993 – The Blizzard of 1993 (Storm of the Century): Snow begins to fall across the eastern portion of the United States with tornadoes, thunder snow storms, high winds and record low temperatures. The storm lasts for 30 hours.

1999 – Former Warsaw Pact members the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland join NATO.

2004 – The President of South Korea, Roh Moo-hyun, is impeached by its National Assembly: The first such impeachment in the nation's history.

2009 – Financier Bernard Madoff pleads guilty in New York to scamming $18 billion, the largest in Wall Street history.

2011 – A reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant melts and explodes, releasing radioactivity into the atmosphere and the Pacific Ocean a day after Japan's earthquake.

2014 – An explosion in the New York City neighborhood of East Harlem (NYC) kills 8 and injures 70 others.

BORN TODAY

1479 – Giuliano de' Medici, Duke of Nemours (d. 1516)

1864 – W. H. R. Rivers, English anthropologist, neurologist, ethnologist, and psychiatrist (d. 1922)

1890 – Vaslav Nijinsky, Russian dancer and choreographer (d. 1950)

1918 – Elaine de Kooning, American painter and academic (d. 1989)

1922 – Jack Kerouac, American author and poet (d. 1969)

1928 – Edward Albee, American director and playwright (d. 2016)

From Wikipedia and Google (images), ex as noted.